BY A THREAD:Three thousand miles for a loan mod

PLIGHT: Diana Mathers-Lykke had to fly to New York City to secure her loan modification.

Last year
, Mathers-Lykke wanted to make her $1,300 mortgage payment at the last possible moment. A Wells Fargo employee told her over the phone she had until Feb. 15. When she went to make the payment that day, another employee told her she was too late, and she was officially in the foreclosure process.

She spent the next 18 months trying to persuade Wells Fargo to take her money. She wrote to John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, she contacted her elected representatives, she wrote to the fledgling Bureau of Consumer Protection. She got assistance from an aide to Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Vista), but it wasn't enough.

Finally, she flew to New York to attend a conference of the
Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America
, a nonprofit that holds conferences around the country in which borrowers can talk to bank officials to get their loans modified. But she was hesitant.

"The people at the bank said, 'If you talk to people at NACA we will not help you, and we will put the case out of our system,'" Mathers-Lykke said. "I thought, 'I don't even want to talk to them if it puts me at risk with this whole process.'"

But she went anyway, even if only to ask questions. She sat down with a Wells Fargo counselor who took care of the whole thing. The counselor lowered the payment to $1,000 a month by reducing interest to 2 percent and extending it out to 40 years. That's a payment Mathers-Lykke can manage.

Getting the loan modified hasn't soothed Mathers-Lykke's nerves any.

"It's like I was standing on quicksand for the whole year, now I stand on the edge of the pit," she said. "They are not acting in good faith. These banks are not too big to fail. They fail everybody every day."

THE PLAN: She said she will remain vigilant about her paperwork and payments, because the bank could change its mind at any time.